performance

Intel isn’t having much success keeping its upcoming Bay Trail-era Atom platform under wraps. If the previous overview leak wasn’t enough, a roadmap uncovered by Mobile Geeks has just explored the finer points of the tablet-oriented Bay View-T and its Valleyview-T processors. The most surprising leap may be in graphics: while we knew the GPU core would be much faster, we’re now seeing that the new Intel hardware can output to as much as a 2,560 x 1,600 display and record stereoscopic, 1080p 3D video in the event that 3D-capable tablets come back into vogue. Likewise, battery life should be rosier than you’d expect; Bay Trail-T can reach the same performance at half the power, which should lead to about two extra hours of video playback for at least some of the 1.6GHz to 2.1GHz processors in the lineup. Don’t get too excited by the potential, however. If the leak is accurate, Bay Trail for tablets isn’t expected until early 2014, by which point 22-nanometer Atoms will be a step behind the cutting edge.

A new report released by Capgemeni Consulting based on years of joint research with the MIT Center for Digital Business found that digitally mature companies are, on average, 26 percent more profitable, have a 12 percent higher market capitalization, and get 9 percent more revenue from current assets. The advantage is there in every industry.

‘Digital maturity’ is defined by two things. The first is digital intensity, which means significant and well thought out investment in digital technology and capabilities. The second is transformation management intensity, actually shaping the practices, governance, and future of the company around digital efforts.

The report divides companies into four different quadrants based on their performance on the above. ‘Beginners’ have barely started, usually because they’re unaware of the opportunities, ‘Fashionistas’ adopt the newest or sexiest digital innovations, but without a cohesive strategy or eye to maximizing business value, ‘Digital Conservatives’ have a cohesive vision, but are slow to invest in new technology, and finally, the ‘Digirati,’ who both invest in digital and integrate it with their whole organization.

Capgemeni’s examples of digitally mature companies include Volvo, Burberry, and Nike. They’ve succeeded by making social media and digital tools a fundamental part of the way they do business, instead of just an ongoing experiment.

The 397 global companies researched exist on a huge spe! ctrum. T he Y-axis is digital intensity, and the X-axis is transformation management intensity:

It’s been hard to gauge how big Facebook’s new real-time bidding platform for advertisers, Facebook Exchange, has become since it was launched in June, but global sales chief Carolyn Everson let slip just how big it could be in a recent conversation with Adweek and Group M digital chief Rob Norman.

First Norman said he believed FBX had “quadrupled” the size of the available market for advertisers who wanted to place ads based on real-time bidding in exchanges:

We love it. We absolutely love it. Massive, massive, massive increase in the amount of exchange traded media. We think it’s probably quadrupled the market in terms of availability of total impressions.

Then Everson said FBX was performing better than Google’s ad exchange:

So we are very excited about Facebook Exchange. We’re excited about the results that we’ve seen. Our performance so far in the Exchange is doing better than the Google Exchange, and Triggit and others have all spoken up on our behalf.

The caveat here, of course, is that quadrupling the supply of available ad inventory isn’t the same as quadrupling the demand for it. And the performance evidence from the demand-side platform companies who have been placing ads inside FBX, like Triggit, is so far only anecdotal. Those buyers say clients can get 16X ROI inside FBX. (Notably, FBX was not mentioned in Facebook’s recent 10-Q.)

Every year management consulting Booz & Co. puts together a comprehensive report on the world’s 1000 biggest spenders on research and development, and the connection between that spending and performance.

Booz & Co. senior partner Barry Jaruzelski told us that “in the US, Europe, and Japan that’s fairly easy to put together, but to do it on every market, to get South Africa, China, India, Brazil, Russia, Israel, etc. takes a fair amount more effort.”

There’s an incredible amount of money in R&D. The top 20 companies alone spent $153.6 billion last year, which is more than a quarter of the total $603 billion by the world’s 1000 biggest spenders.

Netflix saw a return to profitability and more than half a million new US subscribers in the second quarter of this year, and it’s now announced that it’s added a full two million more streaming members worldwide for the third quarter. That brings the company’s global base of streaming subscribers to 29 million, 25.1 million of which are in the US. It’s also announced another bump in profits to $8 million in net income, with global revenue of $905 million. It’s unsurprisingly a different story when it comes to DVD subscriptions in the US, however, with the company reporting a drop from 9.24 million total subscribers in Q2 to 8.61 million in Q3.

In terms of usage, Netflix says that its streaming members have now consumed over three billion hours of content, and that TV shows now account for about two thirds of that viewing activity. The company has also reiterated its commitment to original programming in its letter to shareholders, although it notes that commitment comes with some front-loaded expenses that will result in negative free cash flow for the next “several quarters” beginning with Q4. The company further adds that it believes “investment in originals is wise, and we will evaluate the performance of the slate next year to determine at what level we should fund additional original.” You can find the full letter and all the numbers at the source link below.

RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight, the two most credible and widely cited polling aggregators online, both have Obama back in the lead in their RCP Average and FiveThirtyEight Forecast, respectively.

With FiveThirtyEight, Obama never lost the lead, he just severely diminished it.

Granted, it is a mere 0.1 percent lead, and the margin of error alone eclipses it many times over, but still, Obama seems to be out of the weeds after the lackluster first debate performance according to RCP’s measurements.

One major point of contention at the moment is Gallup’s observation that Romney has a six point lead among likely voters, down from seven points yesterday. The reservations were raised because no other firm with a daily tracking poll found anything close to that number.

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight’s proprietor and mastermind, had an excellent post Thursday on the Gallup numbers and why, in light of the huge disparity between the Gallup’s tracking poll and rivals’ tracking polls, the number is most likely inaccurate.

If Silver is correct — he has a habit of being correct — ! and Gall up is far off the mark compared to the firm’s competitors, then the RCP average will likely rise as the polling data self-corrects.

LinkedIn seems to have hit its stride as a public company, with the stock soaring 86% year to date.

LinkedIn reported earnings last night, and once again, it was a strong performance. In this era of hot tech companies IPOing and then getting crushed, it’s nice to see LinkedIn doing so well. The company has been pretty flawless in its execution as far as we can tell.

Below, you can see the stock growth comparisons for LinkedIn, Zynga, and Groupon from the first day of trading. It’s good news for Zynga. As you can see it took LinkedIn almost 7 months to get back to its opening trading price. Zynga has crashed, but if it can deliver a strong performance, it too could rebound.

Shares of Deckers – maker of the ubiquitous UGG boots – are plummeting after the company reported disappointing earnings.

EPS dived to $0.20 from $0.49 last year. Analysts were expecting $0.25.

“Our first quarter performance was mixed versus our expectations,” said CEO Angel Martinez. “Sales growth was driven by the addition of the Sanuk brand combined with increased demand for the UGG brand spring line, partially offset by softness in boots due to the unusually warm weather.”

This is a vaguely awkward message for NVIDIA to be putting out. On one hand, the company is best buddies with Intel and is hoping to see its next-gen GPUs bundled with a large portion of the Ivy Bridge notebooks that will ship this year. But to reach that target, it must risk irking Chipzilla by emphasizing the limitations of Ivy Bridge’s integrated graphics. That’s exactly what happened at a recent presentation, when NVIDIA told us there’ll be “nothing Ultra” about the performance of a regular Ivy Bridge Ultrabook because the integrated HD 4000 graphics will only handle around 43 percent of current games. By contrast, if you add in a GeForce GT 640M you’ll find that 100 percent of current games are playable with frame rates over 30fps and high detail settings, including Battlefield 3, Batman: Arkham City, Crysis 2 and many others. If you leave the lightweight Ultrabook spec behind and combine Ivy Bridge with a GT 670M GPU then you can go even higher — as we just discovered in our review of the MSI’s GT70 gaming laptop. Fortunately, Intel was pretty magnanimous about HD 4000 when it briefed us, and readily accepted that enthusiasts will still want discrete graphics, so we don’t imagine the slide above will cause too many hurt feelings.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.